unexpectedly, he drafted a poem about it; there are only fragments left,
but it is titled ‘Beauty’:
The beautiful, the fair, the elegant,
Is that which pleases us, says Kant,
Without a thought of interest or advantage.
[.. .]
A shrapnel ball –
Just where the wet skin glistened where he swam –
Like a full-opened sea-anemone
We both said ‘What a beauty! What a beauty, lad!’
I knew that in that flower he saw a hope
Of living on, and seeing again the roses of his home.
There is more to this fragment than a simple redefinition of beauty for
the wounded man’s sake. Owen’s rejection of Kantian disinterestedness in
favour of the flagrantly interested applies to his own situation as an artist,
too. For in the trenches, there is no disinterestedness possible, no self-
removal from what one sees. Where Kant formulated the judgement of
beauty as a way of reconciling the demands of necessity (in physical nature)
and freedom (in moral action), Owen’s ‘beauty’ comes from a situation
where necessity and freedom are at each other’s throats, and where disinter-
ested contemplation is not possible. As Jean-Luc Nancy has pointed out,
Kant’s aesthetic citizen is implicitly independent and wealthy – disinterest-
edness implies no pressing needs – but for Owen, such independence is
possible only as a betrayal, and he will not grant the luxury of such a refined
position to himself, or to a civilian readership that wanted to distance itself
from suffering.^16 Hence beauty in this poem is aesthetic (the sea-anemone
comparison is not ironic in itself), interested in the possibility of escape for
the soldier, and, simultaneously, grotesque. Owen’s aesthetic risks the
impossible collision of these reactions – too many rhymes, too many
identifications – by refusing to balance or cut down, because that would
imply some position of detached perspective, and to have such a perspective
on the war is in some way to be out of it. This may be the reason why he
takes such extraordinary risks in these lines from ‘Insensibility’:
Having seen all things red
Their eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.‘Seeing red’ is a cliche ́which Owen grimly literalises in the manner of
Sassoon, compressing bloodlust and bloodbath together. And yet there is
a certain appalling jokiness to the pun, and in the next line, a shiveringly
192 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism